For years Abel and I went on finding remains of these effigies, some of which bore a striking, though most no more than an approximate, resemblance to our father. Those made out of vegetable or fruit were, of course, rotten and fly-blown, the home of termites and leucous-bellied grubs, the sanctuary of snails and slugs by the time we came across them, and of use to us only in a philosophic sense. But the stone ones weathered well, losing only beards and noses, and otherwise retaining so much of their life-likeness that Abel kept a couple which he played with as toy brothers, setting them against each other in imaginary conflicts. To this day I have an especially fine example in my belongings, and although I never attended sufficiently to my father to learn the art of ventriloquism, I do sometimes try to make it speak, to make it say, Bleh! bleh! bleh! and Very good and Right and I have spoken, and to get it to agree to forgive me for what I did.
Whether God ever forgave my father his usurpation of the Creative Urge, whether in fact He did not choose finally to punish him with me — I am not the one to say. But His wrath was indubitably kindled when at last, driven to near distraction by the universal complaint my father had orchestrated, He drew back the curtains of the skies and beheld the full extent of the blasphemy:
Whole hillsides peopled with puppets… with their mouths open… and their fists raised… and mutiny on their lips.
‘Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image,’ He said — spake rather, for truly this was SPEAKING. ‘Neither —’ Said the puppets: We are not idols.
‘Neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone, to bow down unto it —’ Said the dummies: We are not bowed down unto.
‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is under —’
Said the dolls: We are rough, inferior likenesses. We speak only with the single tongue You gave us, and express the frustrations only of the single heart You made.
Perhaps this sounded a little too like sympathetic magic for the One True Voice-thrower’s taste; or perhaps my father’s new command of language smacked suspiciously of necromancy; whatever the reason, the charge was suddenly no longer idolatry but occultism.
‘There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to rise in a lying position, or that useth his hands to conceal, or that casteth his voice to deceive. For all that do these things are an abomination to the Lord. A man that is a charmer shall surely be put to death; he shall be stoned with stones; his voice shall be cast back into his throat; the rod that he conjureth with shall be as a sword upon him.’
There followed a dread period of silence. The Mirthless One had spoken. As always, after one of His pronouncements, I could smell blood in the wind.
The old weariness descended on me, and on my mother, and, I do not think it would be fanciful to say, on Abel. The old suffocating storm-cloud oppression of the Universal Mind closing, closing, closing…
Moral entities we may be, but there is only so much morality we can suffer at the end of a bludgeon. If the Devil addresses us in honeyed words, no wonder we listen to everything he has to say. Let hell gape, we leap joyfully down when the heavens boom and threaten.
We bent our necks and waited, hoping that my father, wherever he was, whichever he was — for we had not so far distinguished him from his marionettes — knew to bend his neck and wait quietly too. It would not have been a good idea for him to have continued playful — Adam of the thousand voices — under these lowering skies.
But then he had not put himself to all this trouble, had not stationed copies of himself wherever he could get them to stand, only to capitulate at the first reprimand. He was not a thinking man but he must have anticipated resistance. He must have planned what he would say to God once he had secured His attention in this novel manner and stood revealed in the perfect light of His blame.
The silence stretched dreadfully on. The Universal Mind, which had been closing for more years than there were numbers to name them, closed still more. We did not hear the ancient gates creaking on their hinges, the dragging of rusted chains — but it was as if a lid were being slowly lowered over us, taking away the air we breathed, the illusion of height, space, choice.
I counted the beats of my mother’s heart, and Abel’s, until they were indistinguishable from mine. Somewhere out there, biding its time, was my father’s resolution. I believed I could follow its pauses and detect its rhythms. Soon, soon, it would have to seize its moment.
And then it spoke — truly, as though it were a god itself, it spake:
Lord (and that word was enough to cause the hairs to rise like Babel’s towers on the three bowed heads of his little family) –
Lord (so proud of him were we) — Lord (and so fearful for him were we) — Lord (and so sure was I that he’d already used up all the language in him) –
Lord… unto Thee do I give thanks. Thou broughtest me out of the miry clay and gavest me the power to bring out from the same nothingness an hundred others like unto me. Behold, I can make their mouths to open, and I can lift up my voice in their voices, and I can bind their purposes to my purpose. See, how they wait upon my will, as I, O Lord, wait upon Thine. See, how I dandle them on the end of a cord, as Thou, on the end of Thy cord, dost dandle me…
(Was this my father?)
But my likenesses, Lord, are without spirit, and without soul, and without heart. They will perish in the sun and rain. And they will not know their passing. Therefore am I a poor manufacturer compared to Thee, and a sorry wizard. I was not there when Thou laidest the foundations of the earth, and the cornerstone thereof. I do not know where is the way where light dwelleth, by what way it is parted and joined again. I cannot compel the unicorn to serve me, or clothe the horse’s neck with thunder, or draw out leviathan with an hook. Wherefore I am weak, Lord, and abhor myself, and in my frailty and solitude miss the comfort of a wife.
How much longer, then, I pray Thee, the days of her separation?
More than once had I listened to God listen, felt the earth tremble like a tuning-fork to the vibrations of His mighty auscultation, actually heard the hairspring of His hearing whirr and click like the drumming of a monstrous cicada. But never before, to my ear, had His attentiveness been so audible. It hummed, it buzzed, it rubbed its legs together; before my father had finished it even droned, sending everything in nature that had the skill to bore scuttling into its holes, scattering the birds off the trees, driving the fish deeper into their waters, and forcing us to screw up our faces and clasp our hands around our heads.
There was no mistaking the meaning of the sound.
Divine approval.
Divinity liking what It heard and wondering how soon It would be able to appropriate and use it as Its own.
The spirit of Ineffable Plagiarism, in other words, rejoicing in Its right to repossess whatever took Its fancy, droit de Seigneur — for all things must be rendered unto Him who originally rendered all things — and enjoying in advance another grand effect, one more killing refutation of one more detractor waiting undisclosed (but not undisclosed to Him) in the corridors of time.
Knowst thou what way light is parted…?
Then abide in shadows.
Canst thou clothe the horse’s neck with thunder…?
Then clothe thyself with silence!
As with mortals, so with gods: we lose ourselves in ill-definition and crave elucidation — heroic elucidation if we can find it — of who we are. Hence the prodigious success of flattery. To look into another’s words and see there a reflection not only distinct but resplendent, magnificent and immutable — ah, that truly is the best we ever know of happiness. Found! found! — the errant self. And with not a hair out of place. If love sometimes obliges similarly that is because love, too, sends out search parties. But love is supererogatory, a luxury, expendable so long as there are courtiers and choirs, knee-benders and kneelers, to do the job. He Whose Name Is Praise gave up on my mother — as it was eternally written that He would — in the instant that my father sprang up here, there and everywhere, in a multiplicity of crudely fashioned guises, and returned from every one the sort of godlike reflection that no god can resist. Why bother landing mere flesh and blood woman in One’s net when One can whistle out leviathan? He had always known what He was capable of whistling, of course, but knowing One’s own strength is not the same, is nothing like the same, as hearing it attested by a choir of voices.